Keith K. Hopewell - Broken Systems in C Major

About

This installation incorporates surface deconstruction, film and sound, bringing together, many disciplines perhaps not seen until now.  Hopewell is a renowned practitioner with the spray-can related medium under the pseudonym Part2ism, for his radical and unorthodox approaches to art in public space. Keith has also recorded critically acclaimed material for the Big Dada/ Ninja Tune label, working with artists such as, New Flesh, Rammellzee. Blackalicious, Saul Williams, Roots Manuva, Anti-Pop and Blackalicious.

Broken Systems is a reductive spatial piece, focusing on the effects of low sound frequencies on the human body, as the viewer becomes a vibrational string being stretched and plucked inside an echoic chamber. On the wall of chamber entrance is a large projection of Spray painted surface remnants, forensically removed from the concrete of a historical London graffiti wall. The fragments appear to be reacting to the sound resonance, returning back to the aerosols natural anamorphic state. The fluctuant panning of the camera somehow creates impressions of kinetic landscapes and coastlines viewed from the air. As a clear division of space between image and sound become apparent, a purely sensual experience of instability begins to unfold.

“It’s both the slow rumble of structural damage happening in real time and the distilled essence of anticipation. Heart thumping, you open the door, and - - - shine. You’re swallowed into a moment of harmonic richness, pressure, rhythm and possibility. As a piece of art, it’s designed to create a powerful experience of sensory disorientation, and it’s at work long before you actually find it. Pumping a perpetually transposed one bar bass sub-wave into a blackened sound chamber, you, the subject, stand inside, at first hugging the wall, unable to tell whether you’re in a space four feet by two or 40 by 20. There’s a lurking discomfort you might be about to commit an accidental invasion of somebody else’s intimacy. Deprived of vision, you’re forced to listen, as they say, as if under a microscope. This is sound decomposed to its rudiments: a single frequency that your body physically resonates. It builds, darting through different spatial registers, becoming momentarily overwhelming, then eddies back to nothing. Your brain, looking for sugar, tricks you into finding shadow melodies.” 

James McNally (From the sleeve notes of ‘Chaoid Systems’)